"Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella is trying to boost Microsoft’s sales of databases, which help companies store and analyze data. Its goal is to take customers from top vendor Oracle, whose share of the market was twice that of Microsoft’s in 2014, according to IDC. Adding a Linux database also lets Microsoft target the most complicated, high-performance systems, and helps the company sell more to existing customers that use more than one operating system, Nadella said.
“Windows Server, for all our success, we never were big in high-end computing,” Nadella said. “Now, we get an opportunity to go after a big market that we never participated in.” The Linux and open-source database market generated 2014 revenue of $4.4 billion, according to IDC data. Windows databases brought in $6.9 billion that year."